Handsome Farmer Bird Brother is on fire, and then what?

Wen | Xinyan, author | Liu Sixuan, editor | Sang Mingqiang

"Handsome Farmer Bird Brother" is a name that is destined to be written into the history of the development of short videos.

Since the release of the first video on Douyin in November last year, in less than 200 days, Shuai Nong Bird Brother has accumulated nearly 3 million fans (Douyin account), equivalent to an average daily growth of 18,000 fans; and more than half a month ago, Shuai Nong Bird Brother opened a B station account, and has only released 17 videos so far, which has won 40 million views.

The last account with such an amazing growth rate of fans was probably Zhang Classmate.

With the same focus on rural life and the same high-quality editing expression, it is not difficult to see the relationship between the teacher and the successor. In fact, before the explosion, the handsome farmer bird brother was silent in the short video circle for two years, but the response was flat; until later, Zhang classmate accidentally became popular, and the multi-lens, fast-paced editing method provided inspiration, and there was today's "southern version of Zhang Classmate".

Pushing forward, it is not uncommon for video creators to rely on rural themes: Li Ziqi, Wild Food Brothers, Huanong Brothers, Xu Dasao, and Tian Grandma and Zhang Ruoyu, who are active on Douyin, these creators choose to focus their lenses on rural life regardless of whether they are in the east, west, south, and north. Whether it's making traditional food, handicrafts, or recording funny things between relatives and neighbors, rural life has obviously become the traffic code for short video creation.

Witnessing the successive explosions of "handsome farmers" in the short video era, we can't help but ask: why can rural themes go out of the circle, and is the local flow the next golden oil?

Exquisite face

Short videos are visual creations, and like film works, there is no excellent visual effect as a signboard, and even the best content has few audiences. Counting these rural short video works out of the circle, all of them have achieved harmony and even innovation in appearance and perception.

Picture quality, sound, this is the element that the beginner players represented by Huanong strive to guarantee, do not deliberately design the composition, but work hard in camera position, scenery, sports lenses, etc., to be rich, flexible and realistic; in the hands of advanced players such as Li Ziqi, video creation began to pursue beauty, using transition techniques and landscape paintings like composition, focusing on creating the atmosphere of pastoral pastoral; and then later Zhang Classmate, Bird Brother, began to emphasize the stylization of video, with fast-paced editing, exclusive BGM, Sign moves and other ways to play personal memory points.

The video upgrade path that roughly coincides with the chronological order reveals the change of the audience's interest in rural short videos.

Before 2018, that is, the eve of Li Ziqi and Huanong Brothers' popularity, it can be recorded as the 1.0 stage of rural short videos. During this period, Douyin has just been launched, and the short video content is tuned according to the jitter and fast platforms, showing two major directions: on Kuaishou, a group of northeast old iron records life; on Douyin, a group of cool technology streams have emerged. At this time, the rural theme came out of nowhere, becoming a clear stream independent of the first two.

At this stage, the audience group dominated by urban youth requires documentary, takes short videos as a window to understand rural life, and observes as the "other", and the curiosity is greater than empathy. The emergence of Li Ziqi and others has broken the rural picture in the previous short video content that is equal to the spirit boy and the shouting of wheat, and changed the inherent cognition of the "dirty and messy" in the countryside. Green mountains, green water, farmhouse meals, coupled with simple clothes of the protagonist, just in line with people's imagination of rural revitalization. It is worth mentioning that in 2017, "Aerial Photography China" was broadcast, although the first season was only six episodes, the beautiful countryside under the aerial shooting satisfies the appetite of urban people, and the emergence of rural short videos just makes up for the unfinished shortcomings.

From 2018 to last year, Zhang appeared, which is the 2.0 stage of rural video, showing the idealized characteristics of pastoral life. Early creators began to transform, such as Li Ziqi, signed a company, had a team, and registered a personal brand. It was during this period that large-scale productions began to appear under the rural label, and elements such as Hanfu, intangible cultural heritage, and monuments were skillfully integrated, showing a film texture under the lens of a professional team, and even attracting well-known actors to follow the trend and open the trumpet, away from the set, telling the story of pastoral pastoral.

By the 2.0 stage, the audience's visual threshold has shifted from "other" to "self", no longer satisfied with the sidelines, but more requiring a sense of participation; to put it simply, it is from "what you have" to "what I want". This batch of works has a commonality, that is, there are rare urban elements. Rural videos play a utopian role and become a place for viewers to pin their ideal lives, and the more "fairy" the video is filmed, the more relaxed and leisurely it is, the more it can stimulate the desire to watch.

After the emergence of Zhang, the motivation for the creation of rural videos is no longer to record life and promote agricultural products, but to become a pure self-media logic.

Take Zhang, for example: his own high-frequency fast cuts pinch the audience's preferences, tuck into the complete story line while avoiding burnout, and increase the stickiness of the audience in the form of short dramas, thereby improving the retention rate. He once said in an interview, "How to get online traffic? What is the official content? In fact, I especially understand in my heart how a work is popular, and I have studied it very thoroughly. "Creating with the idea of self-media operation makes the works at this stage show an unprecedented degree of completion."

Seductive Riko

In addition to the audiovisual modification, the rural short video is more attractive in the inside.

According to the 2021 Statistical Survey on the Development of the Internet in China, the number of internet users on the mainland has exceeded 1 billion, of which 70% are urban netizens. According to Kuaishou statistics, 29% of the users interested in the three rural areas on the platform are from first- and second-tier cities. With such an audience composition, rural life easily stands out from the theme of reinforced concrete as the background, just as when urbanization was not yet growing, we imagined a life of splurge from idol dramas.

We can divide the audience of rural videos into three categories by geographical factors: urban, migration from township to city, and rural.

For home-grown urban audiences, the meaning of rural content is relaxation. On the commute, after eating, the fragmented time is just enough to watch a country video. Unlike those who share experiences that spread anxiety, in the videos of farmers, all they get is kindness and comfort. The protagonists in the video never preach and demean, nor do they openly or secretly show off how many certificates they have taken and how many hundreds of thousands of dollars they have earned. Burning firewood, catching a sea, and sitting at the same table across the screen to eat and chat is like going to a farm yard during a holiday.

Urban audiences' preference for rural themes has not emerged in recent years. Since the launch of "Country Love" in 2006, it has already achieved long-term ratings, and has set a rating of more than 12%, a cumulative network click rate of nearly 10 billion, and even crushed phenomenon-level divine dramas such as "The Biography of Zhen Huan" at its peak. To some extent, works with rural themes have risen to subcultures and become a cultural symbol, as long as the countryside is mentioned, you can think of intimate neighborhood relations, demonic ghosts and animals, countless stems, and then provide space for discussion and secondary creation; with more and more rural content, this subcultural space has also been expanded larger, and more audiences can be accommodated in it.

For the latter two audience groups, rural short videos mean return and choice.

Young people living in big cities see the changes in their hometowns through short videos and think about whether they can tell their own stories. After Zhang and Brother Bird became popular, a large number of disassembled videos appeared on video platforms such as Station B and Douyin, from shooting skills, lens grouping to post-release operations, all of which made a detailed analysis, and such content could even get 10W+ playback. Especially under the guidance of the current major platforms to support the theme of three rural areas, more and more young people from rural areas have begun to participate and pick up mobile phones to create.

After earning a roar

Every full-time video creator has to face the problem of monetization, and the main ways to monetize short videos are nothing more than two: advertising and platform support. Some bloggers have tried to create personal IP and launch peripheral products, but they have achieved little and cannot form a stable source.

The road of advertising is that most creators are unwilling to go, although they earn more, but it will attract the disgust of fans, the recommended products have problems, and the follow-up will also attract the accusation of "just rotten rice" and smash the signboard. However, as the number of creators continues to decrease, the support given by the platform to the creative individuals is also weakening. Half a month ago, a game area with 500,000 fans on the B station said that "the creative incentive was reduced by 80%", and another creator immediately followed the post in the comment area and was reduced by 90% of the incentive income.

The weakening of incentive revenue is undoubtedly a heavy blow for rural content creators. The biggest weapon for rural content to unite the audience is simple and real, and the addition of too many commercial elements will break this layer of reality, but will produce a sense of deception. This kind of example of being regurgitated by the audience is not uncommon on major short video platforms, Xu Dasao, who records rural life, has been boycotted because of the opacity of income, and the Douyin account "Niu Aifang's Little Spring Flower" received a large number of sneers after bringing goods for kitchen appliances live.

Internet + agriculture, live broadcast of self-operated agricultural products have become the mainstream monetization methods of the current three rural content. At the end of last year, a company called "Liaoning Zhang Classmate Agricultural Development Co., Ltd." was established, and the registered address was The video shooting place yingkou Dashiqiao, and Zhang Kai (Zhang Classmate himself) served as a manager.

Self-built agricultural product brands, online store retail, as early as Zhang students, Li Ziqi has made such an attempt, the current major e-commerce platforms in the sale of "plum snail powder" monthly sales of more than 100,000, annual sales reached 1.6 billion yuan. The opposite of the online store performance is the average daily powder drop rate of 10,000 on Li Ziqi's Douyin account. When video bloggers no longer operate content and become online shop owners, it is unknown how many people in the audience who watched the video at the beginning were willing to stay in the traffic pool.

There is no eternal head in the short video era, especially under the life theme of low creative threshold, if you are not careful, the account with millions of fans will become a tomorrow in the blink of an eye. As the CCTV network commented: "We should not sink the 'harvest' of rural or small-town youth as the end point, commercial realization, make a profit and leave, we should pay attention to the countryside as the starting point." "After earning a lot of money, how to maintain freshness and attention for rural creators is a problem worthy of serious consideration."